Barking, Bearish & Bloating

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Tomorrow night, we have an improv show. And ticket sales are going… how do I put this in a way that sounds calm, measured, and CEO-like?

Bad. They are going bad.

Much slower than normal. And by “normal,” I mean every show we’ve done before this has sold out. Usually standing room only. Usually a bunch of people packed into a small theater, laughing, drinking, sweating, and hopefully not regretting the $15 they spent to watch grown adults pretend to be pirates, divorced dads, or whatever dumb idea gets yelled from the audience.

This will be our 11th show. The first 10 sold out. The group has genuinely never been better. The team is trained. The chemistry is there. Everyone is insanely talented. We just submitted for New York Comedy Festival this fall, so fingers crossed there. By every rational measure, the product is better than ever.

And yet… tickets are moving like a cargo ship through pudding.

Now, I do think there is a very obvious explanation here, which is that it’s a long holiday weekend because of Juneteenth. A thing I, candidly, did not really consider when I booked the date months and months ago. Hand up. That’s on me. Nothing says “savvy operator” like scheduling your comedy show for the exact moment everyone exiles New York City.

This left 2 options: 1) Sit around, refresh the ticket page, and pretend “the algorithm” was the problem. Or 2) Hit the streets & sell.

So last night - to the village we went. 8 of us. Barking. QR codes in hand.

For those of you who don’t do comedy in NYC - which I assume is most of you - “barking” is the comedy version of cold calling (but face to face). You walk around, approach strangers, and yes, it totally sucks ass. “Hey, you free Thursday night? Want to come see an improv show?”

And then you get to experience every possible flavor of rejection in real time.

Some people ignore you completely. Some people politely say “no thanks,” which honestly feels like an “I love you” compared to the rest of it. And then there are the true sickos. The ones who respond with, “Okay, tell me a joke then funny guy.”

This was probably the fourth or fifth time we’ve gone barking for a show. I can confirm it does not get easier. You want real sales experience? Go stand on a New York City sidewalk and try to convince strangers to come to your improv show.

No attribution model. No retargeting. No warmed-up audience. No Klaviyo flow gently nudging them toward conversion. Just you, a flyer, and a banker named Trevor from Murray Hill who wants you to “say something funny” before he even considers scanning the QR code.

It is humbling. It is demoralizing. It is also probably good for you.

Because at the end of the day, selling is still selling. You can have a better product than ever. You can have past proof. You can have a great team, real momentum, and a bunch of people saying, “You guys are actually really good.” And still, the seats do not magically fill themselves. You have to go get people in the room.

Which is, unfortunately, also true in e-commerce.

A lot of us spend all day trying to get people in the room. Click the ad. Open the email. Land on the site. Add to cart. Buy the thing.

But there’s another sale that happens after the sale. It’s quieter, less sexy, and usually buried in your returns portal.

It’s when someone buys three sizes planning to return two. It’s when a customer tries something on, doesn’t love it, and now you’re either saving the relationship or handing them a refund. It’s when “free returns” sound great until you realize you’re paying for the label, the support time, the lost revenue, the inventory headache, and the slow bleed of margin.

Which brings me to Redo. If you run a brand → stop reading here & just book the demo.

I know I’ve talked about returns before, but I’m doing it again because this is one of those boring back-office things that actually matters.

Somewhere along the way, customers got trained. Free shipping. Free returns. Order five, keep one, send four back. No risk. No cost. No second thought.

That expectation isn’t one you built. It’s one you inherited.

Amazon made free, effortless returns the norm. Shoppers learned it there, but now they expect it everywhere, including your store. The difference is Amazon built a returns machine big enough to absorb that behavior. You probably did not.

So most brands choose between two bad options.

Make returns harder and protect margin, but risk torching the customer experience. Or make returns free and frictionless, but eat the cost of every label, refund, and bracketed order.

That is the trap. Most brands are just choosing which way to lose.

The reason I keep coming back to Redo is that it refuses the premise. Redo helps e-commerce brands deliver the easy return experience customers expect without turning returns into a money pit.

The customer experience is clean: branded, self-serve returns and exchanges where shoppers can swap a size or pick something else in a few taps. No emailing support. No waiting around. No federal investigation into your pants.

Redo also helps turn returns into exchanges. Its AI reads the return reason, checks inventory, and recommends the right exchange in the moment.

Too small? Show the better size. Didn’t like the color? Point them toward another color. Want something different? Make it easy before they mentally decide, “Screw it, just refund me.”

Redo also offers instant exchanges, so the replacement can ship right away, protected by a card hold. That matters because waiting kills exchanges. The longer someone sits around, the more likely they are to bail and take the refund.

The results are real. Brands average a 20% lift in exchange rate after switching on Redo. PopFlex saw exchange rate go up 43%. Elwood saw it go up 149%.

Redo also makes returns data useful. Customers are telling you what’s wrong: too tight, looked different in person, material felt weird, ordered multiple sizes, didn’t fit like the photo. Normally, that gets buried somewhere until someone maybe looks at it once a quarter.

Redo’s AI buckets and summarizes those reasons so you can see what is actually happening. Which SKU runs small? Which product photo is overpromising? Which item is getting bracketed to death? That is the stuff that helps you fix the root problem so fewer orders come back in the first place. Malbon Golf cut their return rate 38% using Redo.

And then there is the economics piece.

Redo’s software is free, and they cover the cost of your return labels.

At checkout, shoppers can opt into a small Coverage fee if they want return protection. It is clear. It is optional. It is not some sketchy hidden add-on jammed into the cart like a raccoon in a trench coat. Customers can opt in or out, and 40 to 60% of them typically opt in. That Coverage fee funds the return experience instead of the whole thing coming straight out of your P&L.

And before your first thought is, “Okay, but won’t that make more people return things?” Fair question. Redo has A/B tested this across more than a million orders, and return rates went down, not up.

So instead of choosing between customer experience and margin protection, you can actually get both. Not making returns miserable. Not eating unlimited label costs forever. Just building a better system around the reality customers already live in.

A few real examples:

PopFlex: exchange rate up 43%

Malbon Golf: return rate down 38%

Portland Leather Goods: retained revenue up 58%

Made by Mary: return processing time cut 66%

Translation: more customers stay, more revenue stays, your team spends less time playing returns detective, and your margins stop getting pantsed by a customer behavior you did not create but are definitely paying for.

So here is my direct CTA because I have now brought up returns enough times to legally qualify as “the returns guy,” which is not the personal brand I dreamed of, but here we are:

Book the demo.

The Redo team will run your actual numbers: return volume, exchange rate, label spend, retained revenue. They’ll show you how much the inherited returns problem is costing you and what might be recoverable.

Book a Redo demo here →

You did not create the expectation that returns should be free and effortless. But your customers have it. And they are not giving it up.

The brands that win from here are not the ones fighting that reality. They are the ones figuring out how to meet it without going broke doing it.

Same as barking on the sidewalk. You can complain that the crowd is not showing up. Or you can build a better system to get people through the door.

That’s the move. Go make it.